He Went Looking for the Wicked and Found Only Himself

There is a couplet most of us have heard since childhood: 'bura jo dekhan main chala, bura na miliya koy; jo dil khoja apna, mujhse bura na koy.' I set out looking for the bad — and found no one bad anywhere; when I searched my own heart, I found none worse than me.

We usually nod at it as a nice line about being humble, and move on. And in moving on, we tend to read it as self-punishment: a man beating his own chest, declaring himself the worst of all. Touching, perhaps, but a little bleak — who wants to walk around feeling like the villain?

But sit with the actual sequence of the couplet and something else opens up. The man does not begin by feeling bad about himself. He begins on a hunt for the bad in others — looking for the wicked, the way we all do. The discovery is what changes everything: when he finally turns the search inward, the whole project of locating villains collapses. There is no one left to convict.

This piece is about that turn — why honestly seeing your own faults does not crush you, but quietly frees you from the tiring full-time job of judging everyone else.

Kabir was a weaver in fifteenth-century Banaras — not a scholar, not a priest, a working man at a loom. That ordinariness is the whole point of his voice. He had no temple to defend, no scripture to sell, no congregation to keep happy. So he could say what the learned would not: that piety worn for show is empty, that the pandit and the mullah were often quarrelling over the cover of a book neither had read.

His weapon was the doha — two short lines you could carry in your pocket and your memory. Plain enough for an illiterate villager, sharp enough to nick the proudest scholar. That is why his couplets survived not in libraries but on people's tongues, repeated at chai stalls and in folk songs for five centuries.

And Kabir aimed almost all of it at one target: hypocrisy, especially the kind that judges. He had little patience for the person who counts the sins of the world while keeping a careful blind spot over their own. The 'bura jo dekhan' couplet is his cleanest strike at exactly that habit — and crucially, he aims it first at himself. He does not say 'you are all hypocrites.' He says 'I went looking, and the worst one I found was me.' The teaching arrives without a single finger pointed outward.

Read closely, the doha holds two different versions of one person. The first is the inspector — the self that walks out each morning to grade the world. This is the part of us that scans a room and ranks it, that reads a stranger's three sentences and decides their whole character, that finds in every group a few people to quietly look down on. It is busy, certain, and weirdly comfortable. Cataloguing other people's faults is one of the most reliable ways the mind avoids its own.

The second is the one who comes home and finally opens his own door — 'jo dil khoja apna.' Not to flog himself, but just to look honestly. And that honest look does something the inspector never expected: it ends the inspection. You cannot keep ranking everyone else once you have truly seen the same cracks, the same pettiness, the same hunger, running through you.

Kabir gives us the destination in another famous couplet: 'kabira khada bazar mein, mange sabki khair; na kahu se dosti, na kahu se bair' — Kabir stands in the marketplace wishing well to all, with neither friendship nor enmity toward anyone. That is what is left when the inspector retires. Not coldness — the opposite. A wide, even goodwill, because there is no longer a register of who is good and who is bad being kept in the chest.

Here is the misreading that traps sincere people. They take 'mujhse bura na koy' literally — I am worse than everyone — and turn a doha about freedom into a stick to beat themselves with. They start collecting their own faults the way they used to collect others', just aiming the same harsh inspector inward. That is not what the couplet does. Swapping the target of judgement is not the same as ending it.

Look at what actually happens in the verse. The man does not conclude 'I am garbage and everyone else is fine.' He discovers that the very lens that was finding villains everywhere was the problem — and when he turns it honestly on himself, the verdict it returns is humbling enough to make him drop the lens altogether. The point is not 'I'm the worst.' The point is: who am I to keep grading anyone?

That is why the result is lightness, not despair. False humility says 'I'm terrible' and secretly waits to be argued with. Real self-seeing says 'I'm cracked too' and feels the knot loosen — because once you've stopped pretending to be the clean one, you no longer need anyone else to be dirty by comparison. You can let people be flawed, including yourself, without running a tribunal. The doha doesn't lower your worth. It retires you from a job you were never qualified for.

Carry the couplet into today and it reads like it was written for the feed. 'Bura dekhan main chala' — I set out looking for the bad — is now a daily, almost hourly, activity for most of us. We scroll to be outraged. We screenshot a stranger's worst sentence and pass it around. Comment sections are courtrooms with a thousand self-appointed judges, each certain, each scanning for the next person to convict. The hunt for the wicked has been turned into entertainment, and it is exhausting in a way we rarely name.

Kabir's medicine is almost insultingly simple, and it costs nothing: turn the lens around, just once. The next time someone's post makes you feel that hot, satisfying flash of 'how can people be like this,' pause for one breath and ask honestly — is this thing I'm condemning truly absent in me? Not to spiral into guilt. Just to puncture the certainty.

That small pause does something the outrage never can: it returns you to scale. You realise you are one cracked person among billions of cracked people, and the urge to sit in judgement quietly deflates. You don't have to become a saint who loves everyone. You can start much smaller — by catching yourself mid-hunt, and choosing, like Kabir in his marketplace, to simply wish the person well and scroll on. The relief of that is real, and it is yours the moment you stop looking for the bad outside.

Why has this two-line verse outlived the libraries Kabir mocked? Because it quietly undoes a trick the mind plays its whole life — feeling good about itself by measuring others as worse. Pull that one habit and a surprising amount of our daily unhappiness goes with it: the irritation, the contempt, the low background hum of comparison. That is why the doha matters far more than its size suggests; it aims at the root, not a branch.

Kabir liked to say true learning was not in the heavy books — 'pothi padh padh jag mua, pandit bhaya na koy' — but in 'dhai akhar prem ka,' the two and a half letters of love. This couplet is one path to that love, and a very practical one. You do not arrive at goodwill by trying to feel warm toward everyone. You arrive at it by honestly seeing yourself, until the ground for looking down on anyone simply gives way.

So perhaps the question to carry out of this isn't 'who around me is in the wrong?' That question is the inspector, already back at work. A gentler one works better: the next time I am sure someone is bad, can I turn the same honest gaze on my own heart first — and see what is left of my certainty?

Kabir went out hunting for the wicked and came home having found only himself. The strange gift of that homecoming is that there was suddenly no one left to fight.